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Look Homeward, Angels

SOMETIMES I lie in bed at night and wonder what five of the Museum of Modern Art's most famous personages -- Picasso's demoiselles d'Avignon -- think about their recent move from Queens back to Manhattan.

No. 1: I am being so happy! At last we leave les provinces and return to la ville.

There's been a touch of elitism and Manhattan-centrism to MoMA's temporary move to Queens in 2002 and its return to West 53rd Street later this month. We caught the first whiff of it in the museum's advertising.

In 2002, ads for MoMA QNS assured us the museum was just "minutes from Midtown," as if to console those who become addled when not in the presence of modeling agencies and sushi-grade tuna. Current ads for the new museum -- "Manhattan is Modern again" -- further betray an air of loftiness. In some of them, Meret Oppenheim's sculpture "Breakfast in Fur" sits on the counter of a greasy spoon, playing up the incongruity of rarefied art (a fur-lined cup and saucer) and the humdrum proletariat (an inexpensive eatery).

The ads might have rankled less had museum employees quoted in the press not sounded like suburbanites attending their first rap concert. One curator described the temporary stay in Queens as being "like moving from one country to another." Glenn D. Lowry, the museum's director, later offered faint praise for the good attendance records at MoMA QNS with the observation, "It turned out to be far more popular than we expected."

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To be fair, MoMA's tenure in Queens has not only brought prestige and an estimated $34 million to the area, but also continuing community programs, like lectures and special events, with such institutions as P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, LaGuardia Community College and local schools. Moreover, the museum's presence in Queens was, from the start, billed as temporary. (MoMA may, at some point, decide to reopen exhibition space in Queens, but, according to the museum's Web site, not "for the foreseeable future." The building will operate as the museum's center for research and storage. MoMA officials would not reveal how much of its collection would be kept in storage.)

Yet it's easy to see why Queens residents might feel as if they had had a torrid affair with the star of a touring theatricale who has jetted back to the Big City and, instead of sending tear-smudged valentines, called only to ask about the box of scripts he left in your attic. In an unsigned op-ed piece about MoMA's decision not to exhibit art at MoMA QNS after this past September, The Queens Tribune glowered, "We are prepared to challenge the museum's funding." Another Queens Tribune op-ed piece, this one titled, "Cure the Curator," lamented, "Clearly the outer boroughs are still considered the homely sister to the 'Island."'

SOME MoMA QNS visitors found slight disdain for the borough even within some of the MoMA QNS exhibitions themselves. The art critic Kelly Kleiman took the museum to task for projecting videos, at the admissions desk, of the street outside ("In case simple pitiless sunlight on the overweight underdressed isn't enough to put you off," Kleiman wrote in artscope.net, "the shots are taken at ankle height, as though from a pothole: 'What the world looks like from down here."')

Ms. Kleiman also took issue with an Edwin Denby poem that accompanied some photographs of Queens by Rudy Burkhardt that were on exhibit, a poem in which Denby referred to Queens as a "backyard of exploitation and refuse." Ms. Kleiman's comment? "The outer boroughs haven't taken a public hit like this since 'Hair"s Claude Hooper Bukowski bemoaned his roots in 'mucky, slimy, smelly Flushing."'

When I last visited MoMA QNS in September, shortly before it closed to the public, I sensed less disdain than self-involvement. There were no signs to tell me that the wooden crates that filled three of the galleries were simply moving materials, not art, and one of the exhibitions on view in another gallery was an assemblage of pieces of, yes, MoMA QNS employees' clothing. The museum's gaze had decidedly turned inward.

MoMA reopens, in its new $858 million incarnation, on Nov. 20. Amid all the excitement and hoopla, attendant to the unveiling of what will no doubt be a glowing addition to the city's crown of cultural jewels, it's important to remember that progress usually comes at a cost.

One thinks of the famous pronouncement by Alfred Barr, MoMA founding director, that the museum is "a torpedo moving through time" which, as it rockets forward, leaves history in its wake. Has Queens, home to both La Guardia and John F. Kennedy Airports, been left once again in the jet stream?

NEW YORK OBSERVED: THE SOAPBOX Henry Alford's books include "Municipal Bondage: One Man's Anxiety-Producing Adventures in the Big City" (Random House).